Food chains

Great view of the Kingfisher early Tuesday morning. It was accidentally disturbed by some dog walkers and the kingfisher flew up onto a branch overhanging the Winterbourne Stream. It then flew down into vegetation out of site. A couple of minutes later it flew fast and low above the water back up the Winterbourne Stream [...]

Working late and treated to an amazing view of bats feeding over the winterbourne stream just after midnight through the winterbourne stream cam. The bats fly back and forth, twisting and turning coming in and out of view. There are many night flying insects over water and the stream providing a useful flightpath and a [...]

The heavy rain yesterday evening and duri9ng the night left a few muddy puddles around the reserve. To us it was an inconvenience, wet feet if we did not have boots on. With the school that visited today we had to keep taking our footwear off before we went into the Linklater Pavilion because we [...]

There are many types of flying insects that lay their eggs in ponds and other freshwater habitats. These include mosquitos, gnats and non-biting midges. The eggs hatch and develop into free swimming, some of which we discovered during our pond dipping sessions. In fact one midge larva actually became a flying adult in one of [...]

Starting in the spring, small blobs of jelly appear on the underside of many of the pond plants. These are the small egg masses of pond snails and a careful examination under a microscope may reveal the tiny snail embryos. The eggs hatch within a few days and tiny snails with almost transparent [...]

Pond cam has being providing views of how rich the life is in the woodland pond. Some of the pond life is quite large, such as the fish and the newts. But some of it is very tiny, too small to see in detail but you can see lots of tiny creatures swimming in front of [...]

Last Friday, after Robsac School's pond dipping session, we found a small pond animal swimming around in the container which was pointed out by one of the children. We had already chosen the 10 pond creatures for the broadcast so it was not mentioned. However this fascinating pond creature is called Argulus also known as a fish louse. [...]

You may have noticed through our pond cam that there are lots of tiny creatures swimming about. Most of these are tiny freshwater crustaceans called daphnia and cyclops. These tiny creatures are very important as they are food for many of the fish, newts and other animals that live in pond. As the pond water [...]

You may have noticed that we have been having a lot of activity on the bird feeder. To help you identify the birds you are seeing there is a picture below of the 4 main types of bird coming to the bird feeder, great tit, blue tit, house sparrow and great spotted woodpecker. You can [...]

The nature reserve has now settled into autumn and I took a walk around the reserve to see how some of the areas not covered by the webcams had been changing. Many of the trees have now shed their leaves and changed colour but why? Well, they do this to conserve water and energy during the winter. [...]